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February 13, 2013

There a nice post on Innovate on Purpose, Jeffrey Phillips blog, pointing out that “Nobody ever got fired for failing to innovate.” While that’s not entirely true (I known a few who have), the core message is definitely on the mark. Most of the time, short term urgencies create pressure that creates an environment that suppresses innovation. It is far easier to do what is needed to nominally meet our performance metrics than to take the perceived risks of finding an innovative way to exceed them.

This is wrong-headed thinking. While nobody gets fired for failing to innovate, plenty of people do. They also find themselves pushed aside into dead-end positions. Just think about it for a minute.

Imagine you are the CEO of a company and your task is to turn-around the company, or double revenues over the next three years, or attain any other similarly lofty goal. You aren’t going to achieve that objective by doubling down on the strategies that have created the status quo. You need to change course. Perhaps, the answer lies in new products or a new business model. You need to find a new recipe for success that is not only different from what you have done in the past, but you need one that is compellingly different from what your competitors are doing. In short, you need an innovation.

These demands for innovation happen all the time in today’s ultra-high pressure business climate. We may not see it directly, but the failure to innovate is punished quite severely in the work place. The next time you read a blurb about a high profile CEO being replaced by fresh talent, ask yourself on what opportunity to innovate did the outgoing CEO fail to capitalize.

More importantly, as you pursue your own objectives are you failing to ask yourself what opportunities for innovation you are passing over in the rush to address the daily urgencies. Remember to keep your eye on the important issues as well—these are often where innovation opportunities are hiding.

You may not be overtly punished for failing to innovate. But, the big rewards will come to you only when you embrace innovation as essential to your personal success.

February 06, 2013

I’ve been checking back through all the great innovation blogs I like to follow, and I found a nice post on InnovationManagement.se by Chuck Frey titled “The Surprising Connection Between Simplification and Innovation.” It seems rather serendipitous to stumble across this article reviewing Matthew E. May’s book The Laws of Subtraction because just last night a colleague approached me about a new interface in a product update he had just received. He told me how very much he liked the new interface.

What my friend didn’t know was the debate that had gone on behind the scenes during the design of this interface. The designer had put together a very visually compelling, but very different design for the new interface. The design included many components and provided for a rich interaction model. My concern was that users don’t always value richness in interaction; they do like directness and ease of function. So, I asked for an alternative design that drew upon familiar data visualization paradigms to provide a simplified interaction model and that the two designs be tested with actual users.

In the end, the simpler design was selected based on user preference. This was no surprise. The value of simplicity in design has long been recognized. The very essence of this notion is captured in the discipline of value engineering through value equations and codified in various systematic innovation methods such as TRIZ.

Every journey of innovation should include several stops along the way to ask if the current solution can be simplified. This question alone has the power to drive high value innovations.

November 08, 2010

On his blog Medinnovation, Dr. Richard Reece discusses the interconnectedness of innovation across domains of innovation activity in this post. It’s interesting to see his commentary on 10 coming medical innovations in this regard. It is doubly so because this phenomenon is not unique to medical innovation.

Great and transformative innovation stem from the confluence of many different advances and observations. The accumulation of knowledge into the global pool of information provides the water of life for innovation. People seeking to find novel and valuable solutions to needs draw upon this fund of knowledge to synthesize new answers. This is the act of innovation creativity in its pure form.

We should understand the consequence of this as it relates to driving sustainable innovation in the enterprise. Knowledge worker need knowledge with which to work. Connectedness to knowledge of all types is an essential ingredient to create the working environment needed to drive continuous, value creating innovation. This must include seamless access to the enterprise’s internal knowledge, global knowledge from both inside and outside the company’s domain of expertise, and the tacit knowledge of team mates.

Have you ever noticed the degree of innovation serendipity? It is not by chance that different people seem to be creating the same innovation at the same time. Any really interesting, high value challenge is going to attract many potential innovators. Don’t flatter yourself and think you are the only one working on your great project. Also, many potential innovators have access to the same informational resources that you do. This means there is a reasonable chance that when you find a great solution, you won’t be alone.

Yet, it is also the case that most potential innovators have the same poor access to knowledge that you do. This means that you have an opportunity to create an innovation edge. By investing in establishing the best innovation intelligence infrastructure—one that provides seamless access to all sources of knowledge when and how you need it—you can tilt the scales of innovation providence in your favor.

This is a key lesson that innovation leaders must take to heart. You can influence the frequency and value of your innovation outcomes by making the right strategic investments in innovation infrastructure and methods. As we begin to emerge from the past years of economic malaise, companies are all beginning to renew their innovation agenda. Will you take the right steps to ensure that your innovation workers have the right tools to deliver the goods?

August 30, 2010

It’s hard to keep up with all the articles on innovation these days. There are so many outlets now where people are volunteering their experience and advice. A lot of the advice is quiet good. But, every now and then an article appears that assaults the senses like fingernails against a blackboard. Such is the case with “Why Companies Need Less Innovation,” by Pat Lencioni which appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek. I feel sorry for any company that takes this advice seriously.

In this article, the author begins with a very reasonable observation. Many companies do a great job of talking up innovation, and then disenfranchise workers by not doing what is needed to establish a productive and sustainable innovation culture. This is a horrible mistake that many executives make. Simply proclaiming that your company is building an innovation culture doesn’t make it so.

Unfortunately, the article takes a very wrong turn. Lencioni suggests that if workers are innovating, the result will be chaos. What tripe! Does Lencioni really misunderstand innovation so much as to equate innovation with workers gone wild abandoning their mission and acting on impulse? One hopes not, yet this is the message that comes through. Lencioni goes on to suggest that innovation should be the sole domain of the leadership team.

It is well understood that the ivory tower approach to innovation is a failed model. The leadership team doesn’t have the full perspective to be the sole contributors to the process. Yes, the leadership does have the best understanding of the company’s business needs and objectives. And their position gives them a perspective that the rank and file employees can’t share. But there are too many proof points that teach us that executives acting in such an insular manor are detached from the practical realities that the workers see every day. There are equally many examples of companies benefiting greatly from worker led innovation.

The leadership needs to play an active role in the innovation process, and as Lencioni rightly points out, they need to set the innovation agenda and ensure alignment and execution. However, it is a grave mistake to exclude the workforce from the innovation process.

Worried that innovating workers will cause disruption? Don’t be. Innovating doesn’t mean doing whatever strikes your fancy. For rank and file workers, it means thinking about your job as you do it. Asking yourself questions about what’s working and what’s not working. If something’s not working, what could be done to correct it? If something is working, could it be better? These thoughts and analysis must then be given a path through the company’s innovation process so that positive change can be initiated.

Will every worker contribute a ton of ideas? No. But, building a constructive process to tap into the collective wisdom of the organization will yield strong benefits and fuel innovation. It will not erode execution. Quite the contrary, it will lead to higher levels of execution. As a senior manager, I will choose thinking workers over mindless robots every time.

August 26, 2010

A colleague pointed out a post by Patrick Lefler that appeared on Chuck Frey’s Innovation Tools site this week. In this article, Patrick proclaims that improvement is not innovation. Of course, in the purest sense, the author is correct. While all innovation seeks to deliver an improvement, not all improvements are innovative. But, there is a very important aspect of improvement that, in his fervor to make his point, Patrick has ignored.

Coincidentally, I presented a webinar just yesterday on the topic of harnessing innovation creativity to drive corporate value. One of the key points I touched on was the importance of incremental innovation. Yes, incremental innovation is a good and necessary part of building a sustainable culture and environment for continuous innovation.

Breakthrough innovation, incremental innovation, minor improvement—these are all points on a continuum of value creating solution generation. Incremental innovation is very beneficial to an organization trying to develop the core competence needed to support a high-performance innovation system. Specifically, incremental innovation delivers both short and long term benefits. In the short term, immediate business benefits can be realized—extended revenue life of a product, increased market share, better contribution to margin, etc. In the long term, incremental innovation provides a low risk platform to hone the basic innovation skills needed for successful, repeatable breakthrough innovation practice.

This last point, honing basic innovation skills, is too often overlooked. Most organizations lack these basic skills and the knowledge of innovation best practices. These skills must be developed and practiced constantly. Even seasoned innovation workers should take a page from Basketball legend Larry Bird’s play book. Larry was well known for his work ethic and diligence in maintaining his skills. He would arrive for a game hours before anyone else and warm up by taking hundreds of practice shots.

Efforts to improve, even modest ones, are opportunities to practice innovation thinking and skills. The adept application of innovation practices can move a change further along the continuum of novelty and value creation so that what might have been a minor improvement becomes an incremental innovation that creates strong competitive differentiation.

So while Patrick is correct in the assertion that simple improvements are not innovations, one should not eschew incremental achievements. In fact sometimes the road to breakthrough innovations is paved a brick at a time. In my own research team where we are constantly pushing the limits and redefining the concept of the possible in the area of applied computational linguistics, we often use the expression “step by step” to describe the path to innovation success.

Of course, it’s important to remember that you must be constantly trying to reach further up the novelty-value ladder in order to find the breakthroughs that will provide you optimal market position. But don’t forget to embrace incremental innovation, too. It’s a good thing.

I suspect that Roy’s CEO will be taking a nap about 10 seconds into Roy’s monologue. Like a lot of innovation practitioners, Roy has not adequately considered how to deliver that initial innovation message to the CEO.

It strikes me as odd that this is such a common issue. After all, you wouldn’t dream of introducing a new innovation to the market without understanding the opportunity space. What is it that your customer actually wants and needs? How will they feel the impact of your innovation? Why will they choose your answer to their needs over other available options? How do you communicate the value of your solution to the client in a way that will resonate with them? Etc., etc., etc.

Yet time and time again, innovation champions forget that the CEO is an internal customer of innovation. In the same way that they need to understand the customers who will use innovations, they need to understand the internal customers of innovation. What’s important to the CEO? What business imperatives are top of mind? What are the corporate goals around attainment of revenue growth, market share, and profitability? What board directives does he need to satisfy? From where does the CEO perceive the greatest threats on the horizon to be coming? Which markets look like they are waxing or waning? Etc., etc., etc.

Roy’s message will fail because it is too ethereal and the CEO isn’t going to make a connection to it. Don’t squander your opportunity to make the innovation elevator pitch. Plan for it. Do you homework and understand what’s going to strike a chord with your CEO. Frame your pitch around the CEO’s agenda and make clear and compelling statements that make it evident that innovation is a vital part of the solution the company needs.

Even a pro-innovation CEO may not receive your message well if you fail to do this. After all, the planning and execution of an innovation initiative requires time and money—the two most scarce and valuable resources the CEO has to work with. You are competing for these resources, and it’s up to you to deliver the compelling value proposition that will allow the CEO to choose innovation over the other available strategies.

Recently, I had the opportunity to learn to make beer. I joined a group of friends and together we brewed six varieties of beer. There are innovation lessons to be learned from most things. Here are some innovation lessons I took away from my beer making debut.

ScienceThere is science behind making beer. Understanding what is happening in the process helps you achieve the desired results. This is true for every domain in which I see people working in the trenches of innovation. No matter what you are doing, there is a body of knowledge that precedes your efforts. If you don’t have good access to this knowledge, you are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past and waste a lot of effort reinventing the wheel. High performance innovation organizations understand the need to knowledge enable their innovation workers by providing them with the best, purposeful knowledge research and delivery systems.

TeamDuring our little beer making party, we brewed 6 varieties of beer in one evening (90 minute IPA, Summer Ale, Belgian Blonde, Vanilla Honey Porter, Oatmeal Stout, and Scottish Ale). Getting it all done required teamwork and collaboration. In business innovation practice this pressure to achieve high-value innovation outcomes with limited resources and time is de rigueur. To achieve results requires the same type of committed and connected teamwork for innovation workers. Companies seeking to maximize the effectiveness of their innovation workforce must employ innovation frameworks that connect people to one another when they need based on what they know.

ToolsMaking our beer, we have at our disposal the right equipment to make the job easy and efficient: steam controlled boiling vats, wort cooling filters, automatic bottle sanitizers, etc. Listening to others in our group recount the horror stories of making beer in their kitchens without these tools reminded me of what I see all too often walking into companies that have not begun to deploy state of the art innovation platform technology. Innovation workers struggle to make sense of problems and find the fit between problem states and solution spaces. Companies need to invest in providing their workers with the right tools and skills for innovation success. Sure, you can start a fire rubbing sticks together; but why not give your teams modern torches and set them loose to burn up the competition.

ExperienceHaving the brew master watching over us made a huge difference. He was able to tell us in advance what to pay attention to and how to ensure the quality of the final product we were producing. Preserving, tapping into, and leveraging grey beard knowledge is a huge problem for many companies. Make sure you have systems in place to harvest and disseminate this knowledge to empower your entire innovation workforce and enable the generational transference of your corporate tribal wisdom.

ImmersionMy beer making experience was great. One of the best aspects of the experience was its immersive nature. While we were engaged in brewing or bottling, that was the focus of our activity. There were no interruptions, no need to divert our attention and focus, no co-opting of resources by some other urgency. Of course, we all have to deal with the realities of the real world when we are working in the trenches of innovation. But, managers need to find the way to carve out protected time for innovation workers to focus on what’s important, not merely what seems urgent. You have to willing to invest in your people, giving them the time to master and apply innovation best practices to their innovation tasks. You will find this is an investment that will pay big dividends by both delivering the benefits of accelerated innovation and product delivery, but also greater per worker productivity.

The next InnoBeer tweetup is schedule for Tuesday, June 15th. If you are in Boston, stop on by and join in the innovation conversation. You can get details and sign up (free) here.

May 07, 2010

Spring is a time of change and transition, just right for reading a new book on innovation. “Seizing The White Space” by Mark W. Johnson is the latest volume to come from Innosight, and seems to be right the right thing for spring reading. It’s a highly readable and very quick to get through if your mind has already made the transition to summer; yet, it is has enough chewy content for those of us who are still want to curl up hearthside with an interesting book.

Johnson puts forth what he calls the four box business model to capture the dynamic tension between three key aspects of the value system underlying a business. Yes, that’s right – four boxes to capture three key aspects. These are:

Customer Value Proposition – What is it that customer derives value from when your offering is selected. Of course, given the Christensen heritage of Innosight it comes as no surprise that Johnson returns to the job to be done jargon to talk about the value proposition. Personally, I was just happy to see the value-prop called simply and directly what it is. (Okay, I’m just weary of some authors who feel compelled to try and coin new jargon for what is already a well understood concept.)

Profit Formula – The strategy for monetization of the Customer Value Proposition.

Key Resources and Process – The things, people, and processes that are needed to deliver the Customer Value Proposition. Johnson separates the concepts of resources and process in his representation. Hence, the four boxes to represent three key aspects.

While these concepts may seem pretty basic, there are far too many companies that seem to forget that this system, and more importantly, the need to harmonize and balance these elements of the system exist. Ignoring some of Clayton Christensen’s best advice (be patient on revenues, but impatient about profit) many companies attempting to claim a white space opportunity as their territory burn through loads of capital to try and drive the revenue engine only to dilute the share value so much that no one can hope to extract value from the venture.

Throughout “Seizing The White Space,” Johnson uses many examples and comparisons of how these various elements interact in both successful and failed business models. The examples help to bring to life what could otherwise be a very dry and boring domain of study. You will need to filter some of the discussion through your analysis. Some of the issues around the cases studies are open to interpretation.

After addressing the questions of when and how to look at business model innovation, Johnson reminds us of how existing demands and practice of a going concern can block the organizations ability to define and implement a new system to attack a white space opportunity.

I enjoyed “Seizing The White Space” and certainly recommend it as a worthwhile read for innovation practitioners or managers responsible for considering, planning for, or executing on new business platform opportunities.

This is the fifth stop on a virtual book tour for “Seizing The White Space.” Earlier stops on the tour can be visited at:

Strategy informs innovation – in this model the company defines a strategy, then innovation efforts are pursued to find way to deliver on and enhance the value of the strategy;

Innovation informs strategy – in this model, innovation activity first generates scads of potential concepts which are subsequently mapped to a strategic evaluation model to select the innovation path that builds the optimal strategy.

Whichever approach you select, it is critical that your corporate strategy and innovation efforts are aligned. Without alignment, you have no chance of achieving the level of execution required for successful innovation delivery.

However, I would like to highlight a third model: Innovation and Strategy inform each other. In other words, you are only looking at half of the picture if the dialogue between strategy and innovation is a one way exchange.

If you are responsible for strategy, you don’t want to lament “Gee, if I’d only known that was an option I would have set that as a strategic goal.” As an innovation practitioner, you hate saying “Gee, if I had only known that was important, I could have helped achieve that objective.”

Optimal value is achieved through an on-going dialogue between these two drivers of corporate value.

January 06, 2010

Just before I left for my end of year holiday, there was an interesting post on Bruce Nussbaum’s BusinessWeek NussbaumOnDesign blog. It mentioned a recent statement by Don Norman, a key leader in Design, in which he had stated that innovation is driven by technology and science rather than design’s focus on peoples’ needs. This initiated an interesting discussion that even saw Don Norman weighing in.

I suppose that I should be pleased by such a pronouncement. After all, my own background is from the science & technology side of things, and more than once I have found myself annoyed by thick-headed design bigots espousing fanciful ideas about design being the only thing that matters or that innovation cannot be planned. But on the contrary, I find that the esteemed Mr. Norman is wrong.

Does that mean that it is design that drives innovation? No. Rather, science & technology and design are two equally important ingredients in successful, sustainable innovation.

Strangely in his comment on Nussbaum’s blog, Norman makes the rather absurd claim that need follows the existence of technology. Looking at the examples cited, it is easy to see how laughable this argument is. Norman states, “The need for communication devices (telegraph, telephone, radio, cellphone, internet, postal mail, email) came after the technologies made them possible.” I doubt that Norman can be so naïve as to thinks this is a credible statement.

The need to communicate existed before and independently of the vehicles of communication. As human social conditions evolved, so too did the demand for communication efficiency evolve along various measures. People made due with the technologies available because they did not imagine that alternatives could be available. At times, these limitations placed constraints on other aspects of societal evolution. Naturally, the science and technology needed to enable new modes and models of communication evolved to meet the latent need. These technologies were not adopted because they existed, but because the need existed to drive the adoption. The fact that no one stood up and said, “Boy, a Blackberry would sure make my life easier,” in 1950, does not imply that the need case for the device did not exist.

Yes, it is sometimes very difficult to identify the latent need before it is expressed. But, it is there. Yes, the enablement of a solution requires the science & technology foundation to make the solution possible. But, absent a need, the invention is little more than a curiosity.

Successful innovation responds to a need (design influence); successful innovation delivers a novel solution (science & technology influence). Design leads us to understanding how to marry capability to need in a way that creates value; the language of capability is defined and expanded through invention in science & technology. Thus, it is that the intersection of design and technology is the wellspring of innovation.